Sunday, April 24, 2011

So, good old SLIIT is going through exam season these days. The common rooms are crowded, and the staircases are full of last minute crammers with books and papers lying all around. :) My exams so far have had mixed results, PS was a miss and SPD was a definite hit.

So, remember me saying we might have World Cup coverage around these parts? :D Yeah. Well, the closest I got to the World Cup is when I went to watch the Kenya vs. Sri Lanka match on March 1 with my mates. But fear not, this post is sort of related to cricket.

I helped out a friend of mine studying in Australia with his programming assignment. It was a neat little C program that read from a file, did some basic data manipulation and graphed the results. After being stuck for so long doing non-programming things at uni (Ugh, I thought this degree was about learning to code. How wrong I was...) it was a treat to write some good code and it inspired me to write this follow up program. It's a tiny piece of code that graphs runs against overs, like those Manhattans that they show during cricket matches. The code can be found here.

Friday, April 15, 2011

The sheer volume of stuff we have to memorise for this final is astounding. From obscure statistical formulae to the intricacies of various routing protocols to the exact code needed to write certain Java applets (which even the lecturer admits is an outdated technology) to godforsaken Bash scripts.

It's all too much. And I'm more concerned right now about how good the ocarina sounds on Wild Thing.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

This (Facebook note) was inspired by the Tumblr post Date A Girl Who Reads (by Rosemarie Urquico) which GG had posted on Facebook. :) Disclaimer: I'm NOT an Emacs user. ;)

Date a girl who codes. Date a girl who spends her time on Stack Overflow and not TMZ. Her computer's fucked because she messed with the kernel too much, not because she downloaded "Free Smileys". Date a girl who knows a couple of languages, compiled her first program when she was 11.

Find a girl who codes. You’ll know that she does because she'll always have Emacs open. (What do you mean vi? Are you crazy to even look at the devil's spawn?) She lovingly looks through the Java API, and quietly cries out when she finds that one interface that's been giving her a hard time. You see the weird chick staring at her laptop with her hands on her head? That’s the coder. They can never resist the urge to code, even in public.

She’s the girl coding while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of inheritance and multiple threads. Sit down. She might not notice you, as most coders don't like to be interrupted. Ask her what's up with her indentation.

Get ready to have a cup of coffee thrown on you.

Let her know what you really think of Stallman. See if she can code Lisp. Understand that if she's a fan of Bash scripting, she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Canonical or she would like to work there.

It’s easy to date a girl who codes. Leave her alone when she's coding, but never for too long. Tell her to look out the window from time to time. Giving your eyes rest is important for coders, lest you want her to go blind. Buy her Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming". Let her know that you understand that code is love. That every opened curly bracket is a commitment. Understand that she knows the difference between how code works and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little binary. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

[Can't be fucked writing any further. I've got more important things to do.]

Sunday, April 3, 2011

This post is not really about cricket. But for the record I'll just state that I enjoyed the match and as one of my friends said, "It was a game befitting of a final, unlike 2007". How very true.

But I have to instead talk about a duller and murkier topic than run rates, field placements and Poonam Pandey's knickers. There are a few people who've been suggesting that supporting the Sri Lankan cricket team equals supporting the Government of Sri Lanka and its policies. (The word 'genocide' is thrown around liberally by these people.) While its not untrue to say that a majority of Sri Lanka's 20 million people support the regime, the support for the cricket team transcends any petty political, ethnic or religious lines. They were watching the match in the south, in the north, the west, the east and up in the hills. Cricket is the glue that held us together during the most difficult periods of our history.

For me, I support the team because they represent me, and my 20 million countrymen. Not because of politics, not because waving a lion flag (something I've never done, to be honest) gives me a feeling of superiority or whatever the critics say it's supposed to do.

To all the haters, I say: Go fly a kite. We love our boys, and nothing is ever going to change that.